Together, 181 CEOs overturned decades of thinking about how corporations work, and said that while they still need to serve shareholders, they must also do more — like pay their employees well, give them good benefits, and adopt sustainable practices to help protect the environment.

“The American dream is alive, but fraying,” Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan and Chase and chair of the Business Roundtable, said in the statement.

“Major employers are investing in their workers and communities because they know it is the only way to be successful over the long term.

“These modernized principles reflect the business community’s unwavering commitment to continue to push for an economy that serves all Americans.”

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“What does it mean to say that ‘business’ has responsibilities?” Friedman wrote in the New York Times Magazine, in 1970.

“Only people have responsibilities. A corporation is an artificial person and in this sense may have artificial responsibilities, but ‘business’ as a whole cannot be said to have responsibilities, even in this vague sense.”

Corporate thinking didn’t always work this way, Gervase Bushe, a professor who focuses on leadership and organization development at SFU’s Beedie School of Business, told Global News.

“The original barons of U.S. industry were builders of society,” he said.

“It was Henry Ford who insisted on paying his employees far more than the going rate, for example, and exhorting his peers to do similarly. The Carnegies, Mellons, Rockefellers etc. made huge contributions to the communities they operated in.”

Criticism of shareholder primacy has persisted over the years amid issues such as income inequality and the climate crisis.